What your coverholder can show you when you ask how they control the pen.
A binder is granted on trust and renewed on evidence. For an agency with no track record, the systems are the track record. These are the four questions you will ask, and what can be put in front of you for each.
Cuttleflow is not licensed to bind on its own account, brings no capacity, holds no binder and does not place business. The agency brings the licence, the capacity relationship, the appetite and the underwriting judgement. We provide the systems underneath and the evidence that they behaved.
01 · Authority
“How do you stop someone writing outside authority?”
Authority limits are enforced at the moment of bind, not audited afterwards. Push a risk or a discount past an underwriter’s limit and the system stops offering to bind and starts offering to refer. That can be demonstrated to you in a meeting — the rating demonstrations do exactly that, live.
02 · Replay
“Can you reproduce a premium from two years ago?”
Rule packs are versioned and immutable once live. Any historic quote replays to the same number, and shows which rule version and which wording version applied on the day. That is what can be put in front of you — the number and the rules that produced it.
03 · The ledger
“What is your audit trail?”
A hash-chained ledger written before each state change takes effect. Nothing is overwritten; corrections reference what they correct. What you receive is evidence produced as the work was done, rather than a report assembled when you asked.
04 · Bordereaux
“Will our bordereaux arrive clean and on time?”
Generated from the same records the policies were bound against, to the delegated-authority standard, with the Australian premium components carried as named fields from the day of binding. This is the question that decides whether a binder is renewed and grows — and the answer is built into how the records are kept, not assembled at month end.
Ask to see it, rather than be told about it.
The controls documentation sets out each of the four answers with the screens and records behind them. Ask for it, and put it next to what your other coverholders can show you.
Starting an agency?
What a new coverholder needs on day one — and what it no longer has to build first. Getting to market →